Please, Please, Please
by acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: Two pieces written to songs by The Smiths. [Beware. Part I is not happy. Part II is independent from Part I, and was written as an apology.]
1. Please Keep Me In Mind

The thing you know about Gail Peck is that she wasn't supposed to die like this, not alone and strapped to a table in a dark basement.

Not young and beautiful and with the world stretched out before her.

Not before she'd really figured out how to live.

* * *

There's an unofficial honor guard standing silent vigil in the hallway. Men and women from the 15, a line of rigid jaws and clenched fists. You've never seen such stoic grief.

But then, you've never had a cop on your table before. You've never been called upon to speak for one of their own before, the brother or sister that they couldn't save.

The realization cuts through you and you can feel all your hard-won emotional distance, all the walls you built up to keep the dead from haunting your dreams, slip away into nothingness.

You know that this autopsy will be different than any other you've performed.

You know that this autopsy will change something in you, change something in your life.

You know the job will never be the same after this.

* * *

The orderlies place the body on the table with the kind of delicacy they usually reserve for the tiniest of subjects that come into your care. Each of the dead are treated with dignity, always, of course, but most of the time the act of transporting remains is simply a matter of business. Efficient, respectful, matter-of-fact.

Tonight they are silent too, as if to speak would compromise the great sacrifice of the woman in their arms. As if it would disturb the prayer that the men and women out in the hall are weaving with their bowed heads and shaking bodies, their tears and their heavy, oppressive grief. You can feel the weight even now, it settles over your chest as you stand before the table.

You don't know this woman, but you feel her loss.

* * *

You wash her body as you would your own child's. Tenderly sponging her pale skin, delicately combing through her icy blond hair. She lays before you and you can't help but think how beautiful she is.

Was.

Past tense.

She had the kind of beauty that makes people stupid, and you think that if you had met her when she was alive you never would have had the courage to say hello.

It makes you sad.

It makes you mad.

It makes you ache with lost chances and missed opportunities.

It's a waste, and it's senseless, and for the first time you wish that you were the kind of doctor who put things back together instead of taking them apart.

* * *

You give the results of the autopsy to some detective from another division. 15 can't handle this case anymore, not with the death of one of their own in the case file.

It doesn't matter anyway. The suspect is already in custody. He's already signed a confession. Your findings aren't going to help track down the killer or bring him to justice. The autopsy was just a matter of dotting i's and crossing t's. The final nails in a coffin that's already shut.

It makes you more tired than you've ever been before.

The crowd in the hall has already started to disperse by the time you hang up your white coat and walk out. Life goes ever on, you know. It can't stop for one death, one loss. It can only pause for a moment. The world has started turning again for the officers of the 15, and you know that they're already out on the streets again. You know that there will be another body tomorrow. Someone else's loss. Someone else's grief.

Her family is still here. You know them by their blank, disbelieving faces. By the heavy pull of gravity on their shoulders.

You want to go up to them, tell them how you held their daughter's pure, whole, perfect heart in your hands. How you brushed her eyelids shut against the unforgiving lights of the lab. How you can still feel the weight of her hand in your own. You want to tell them anything and everything, but you know that you cannot. You know that they wouldn't understand.

So you leave them, let them be in a world that is suddenly too big.

* * *

That night you go home and sit on the floor of your kitchen with a brand new bottle of bourbon.

You drink, and drink, and drink.

You're determined to drink until you can't remember the exact shade of her blue eyes, until the shape of her lips fades away, until you're no longer certain whether she has a birth mark on her right hip or her left.

Until you can understand the empty feel the world has taken on in her aftermath.

You drink for a long, long time.


	2. (I Know I'm) Unloveable

Sometimes after a disagreement or a fight that Gail knows is entirely her fault, she'll put on her favorite Smiths album and skip ahead to Track 11.

Sometimes like tonight.

The fight was stupid. Really, Gail was just in the mood to be stubborn. Sometimes she gets that way. Sometimes she just wakes up knowing that she's going to push and push and push until Holly, eternally patient Holly, can't take it anymore and gives in to the fight Gail is trying to start.

It happens less and less now.

But it still happens.

Tonight's fight was about, of all things, dishes. Holly's been talking about getting new dishes for the kitchen, mostly because Gail's kind of clumsy when she loads and unloads the dishwasher, and a bunch of the plates and bowls have little chips on them. And Gail, in one of her moods, refuses to help pick out new ones, insisting that the ones they have are just fine.

To be honest, she'd insist they were still fine even if the damned things leaked all over her every time she tried to eat her cereal or take a drink. They're just things. Gail would be fine eating out of tupperware and drinking straight from the bottle if it came down to it.

Eventually Holly had thrown up her arms in exasperation and left the room.

Gail figured she needed some time to cool off so she didn't follow.

Instead, she finished unloading the dishwasher that Holly had left half-undone.

The dishes really were getting kind of bad.

They were down to only having three usable dinner plates, actually.

Maybe it was time to get something new.

She puts the last dish away and wipes down the counter before moving into the living room.

Holly's sitting there on the couch, deliberately ignoring her. Gail lets her.

She flips on the stereo and slips the cd into the carrier, turning up the volume before queuing up the right track.

And as the strains of "Unloveable" start to fill the house she walks over to the couch, swinging her hips deliberately. She comes to a stop right before her girlfriend, swaying to the lazy-sounding chords.

Slowly, slowly, Gail starts to slide her hands down to the hem of her shirt, and then works it up, up, up over her stomach, her chest, her shoulders, her head. It lands on the couch next to Holly, who is trying hard to focus on the book in her hands and not the woman sexily stripping in front of her.

Gail knows she's got her as Morrissey starts to sing about wearing black. When Holly's fingers start to tremble as she turns the page and her mouth twitches with the effort of not laughing as the blonde swings her bra around like lasso and tosses it across the room. She moves to straddle Holly's lap, plucking the book out of the woman's hands.

"And if I seem a little strange," Gail starts to sing along, fingers working against the buttons of Holly's soft flannel shirt, "Well, that's because I am."

In the morning, after they track down all of yesterday's discarded clothing, they go shopping for new dishes.


End file.
